Two Idaho middle school students were among students representing every state in the nation in Boston, Massachusetts, this summer to craft a document to help schools navigate the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom.
The 98 students were participants in the Day of AI event from July 17-19 at MIT’s Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the US Senate. James Cederquist and Colton Larsson, who were in 8th and 7th grades when they were asked to participate, became student senators along with mostly high school juniors and seniors.
Over the three-day conference, they helped craft “The STUDENTS FIRST Act” of 2026, which stands for “The Safe Technology Use, Data Privacy, and Ethical Norms for Teaching—Fostering Integrity and Responsible Systems in Teaching.” According to NPR, there is no current national AI policy in schools.
“Especially living in a really small town, I just thought it was pretty crazy that our school was able to do this opportunity,” Colton said.
Boundary County Middle School Principal Mark Fisk accompanied James and Colton on the trip. Colton’s parents also decided to go to Boston and spend some extra days there.
Fisk says the Boundary County principal asked him to find two students who would be able to go and James and Colton’s names came up. Colton says he was familiar with AI after making an app called “School Chat” to help create a group chat for his geography class. James says he’s worked with AI too and has talked to a family friend who is a software engineer who uses AI to code.
“Our school is very pro AI,” James said. “We have many teachers that are wanting to teach it to use properly because AI is going to be the future. AI is not going to go away.”
The student senators were given a Google questionnaire about AI before they got started on crafting policy. Based on the answers, a very rough draft was made for the senate subcommittees to debate. Colton was on the Student Section Subcommittee and James was on the Parents Section Subcommittee.
When it came time for the full student senate to vote on the bill, it passed 82-16 in favor of the nonbinding act. James and Colton both voted in favor of the bill, though they say it wasn’t a perfect bill.
“There were some parts that were contradicted and only having two days to work on it there's some parts that got missed,” James said. “And I think this is definitely a bill and work that's going to be revised by each school district as time goes on to fit student work better.”
That’s the hope of The STUDENTS FIRST Act: for school districts to look at it and craft their own policies based on the bill. The bill is split up into five sections: General provisions, Student provisions, Parents and guardians provisions, teachers and administrators.
Among the provisions in the act, students can’t use AI for writing or creating images to bully each other. School districts should begin teaching about AI as soon as technology is introduced in the classroom, parents should be familiar with AI and the district’s policies, teachers should have clear AI policies in their classrooms and administrators must have clear guidelines for AI usage for both students and teachers.
Fisk got to watch the process play out and says they had some good conversations about parts of the bill the boys didn’t agree with or wished they could have spent more time working out.
“I had a lot of pride in these two young men and gratitude for the opportunity … for a couple of our students from a small town in the very northern part of the Panhandle of Idaho to be able to have this experience and do these things and pride in them in terms of what they’re expressing is that they wish that they could have spent more of their summer working in greater detail to iron out things like contradictions or work on this stuff,” Fisk said.
The organizers of the Day of AI have asked the boys to share this act with their local legislators. But before they do, they want to finish out their summer vacation. During their interview with BYU-Idaho Radio, both boys were speaking from the parking lot of the Boundary County Fair where James showed a pig that received a blue ribbon.